Public Knowledge President Gigi B. Sohn said today that Comcast’s suppression of peer-to-peer traffic shows yet again that Congress has to act to preserve an open and non-discriminatory Internet.

“This is the latest in a series of bad examples of how big broadband companies are treating consumers and abusing their power,” Sohn said. “Comcast has already been exposed for setting secret limits on how much bandwidth consumers can use, and then cutting them off. Now Comcast has been shown to use hacker-like technology to cut down on all types of peer-to-peer traffic, again without telling consumers what the company is doing.

“There is a right way to manage traffic and a wrong way. The right way is to let consumers know how much bandwidth they can use, as companies in other parts of the world do. The wrong way is to take control of a consumer’s computer to throttle their use of the network that Comcast simply doesn’t like.

“Add this incident to the Verizon behavior on text messaging and AT&T’s censoring of the Pearl Jam concert and it’s clear that the policymakers who kept saying, ‘Wait until there’s a problem’ before acting on legislation to keep the Internet free and non-discriminatory have to wait no longer. We have a problem, and it’s time to act on it.”